Daniel Dantas has been the bad boy of Brazilian finance for a long time.
Shrewd, competitive, and litigious, he fueled country-wide outrage with a massive telecom acquisition within the 1990s and feuded publicly with his commercial enterprise partners at Citigroup Inc. For years and then became stuck up in a nationwide corruption scandal in 2008. He is arrested on bribery prices, and thrown in prison. In short, his fund compelled him to quickly give up a few belongings. Now, a decade later, Dantas is having a bet on a massive comeback — as a cattle rancher, a speculator in rural land, and a miner. He never thought that he didn’t eat meat. The Opportunity Fund funding company he co-based is stated through industry insiders to very own more ranch land — about 500,000 hectares — than any other business enterprise in Brazil and is thinking about reviving an initial imparting for the commercial enterprise. Separately, Dantas is weighing extra investments into artificial intelligence generation. Things are going so properly for Dantas, in truth, that he qualifies for the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the first time. A new analysis of his price range places his wealth at $1.Eight billion.
Dantas, who has long guarded his assets in complex entities, declined to touch upon his net really worth. With his sister Veronica and longtime accomplice Dorio Ferman, he controls funds that control a document of 26 billion reais ($eight billion) in belongings, more than double the amount it had when he was arrested a decade ago. That includes approximately 4.5 billion reais the authorities unfroze final July. Brazil’s courts annulled the case and freed Dantas of his 10-year sentence.
As continually, contention trails Dantas. About seven hundred humans squat on Opportunity’s land, annoying ownership. The fund’s livestock unit is accused of illegally elevating livestock on embargoed lands that have been illicitly deforested before the fund received them, which it denies.
He owes his new aggressiveness in a component to the reality that he has emerged unscathed within the so-known as Carwash corruption scandal that ravaged many other Brazilian tycoons. As Latin America’s so-referred to as leftist Pink Tide recedes, Dantas does not face strain from the weakened Worker’s Party of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a goal within the Carwash investigation, and his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, who become impeached ultimate 12 months.
“Dantas is taking advantage of a frail moment for the employee’s party,” said Sergio Lazzarini, a professor at Insper Business College in Sao Paulo. “But there’s no saint in this story.”
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Illustrious Clan
Dantas hails from an illustrious Brazilian clan of magnates and politicians. His amazing-brilliant grandfather was Cicero Dantas Martins, a rancher, and nobleman inside the state of Bahia, a negative place that has long been run via oligarchs, who had a municipality named after him. After managing money for a wealthy banker in Rio, Dantas, a Ph.D. in economics, joined with Ferman to locate Opportunity Fund in 1994. It sooner or later grew into a sequence of funds that purchased agencies and controlled cash for people and institutions, as well as their own.
He made his riches and popularity as an economic wheeler-provider in the wave of privatizations of country-owned businesses. It’s additionally he landed in serial controversies with partners. His Opportunity Fund led a consortium consisting of Telecom Italia and Citibank to pick up behemoth Brasil Telecom within the 1990s. But Opportunity and Telecom Italia had a falling out; following 2015, Brazil’s excessive court upheld a judge’s selection to annul the Satyagraha case. The ruling got here after the habeas corpus to release Dantas turned into criticized by 45 prosecutors as a “shameless affront to Brazil’s democratic establishments’’ and blasted employing extra than a hundred thirty judges skipping due system policies in line with letters posted in the local press.
Dantas additionally went on the offensive in opposition to Citi. In a federal health filed in February in New York, he alleged that the financial institution conspired with Brazilian officials to wrest his telecom enterprise’s hobby a decade ago. He said he was punished for resisting the birthday celebration’s shakedowns for marketing campaign cash. Citi stated in a motion to brush aside Dantas’s grievance trying to rehash vintage allegations that lack proof.
The investigator who spearheaded the probe. After a stint as a Communist birthday celebration lawmaker, the police officer is residing in Switzerland and preventing a Brazilian arrest order related to his -yr sentence for violating secrecy policies.